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Grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars/ mountain lions,bobcats, wolverines, lynx, foxes, fishers and martens are the suite of carnivores that originally inhabited North America after the Pleistocene extinctions.
This site invites research, commentary, point/counterpoint on that suite of native animals (predator and prey) that inhabited The Americas circa 1500-at the initial point of European exploration and subsequent colonization.
Landscape ecology, journal accounts of explorers and frontiersmen, genetic evaluations of museum animals, peer reviewed 20th and 21st century research on various aspects of our "Wild America" as well as subjective commentary from expert and layman alike. All of the above being revealed and discussed with the underlying goal of one day seeing our Continent rewilded.....Where big enough swaths of open space exist with connective corridors to other large forest, meadow, mountain, valley, prairie, desert and chaparral wildlands.....Thereby enabling all of our historic fauna, including man, to live in a sustainable and healthy environment. - Blogger Rick

Wildlife groups take aim at lethal control of predators

Updated 8:02 pm, Saturday, May 30, 2015

Federal trapper Chris Brennan is the go-to guy in Mendocino County when sheep or cattle are being threatened by predators, which, it is generally acknowledged, don't stand much of a chance when he is on the case.

He is an excellent tracker, an expert with snares and other traps and a pretty good shot. He has the added benefit, say wildlife advocates and quite a few neighbors, of being a merciless killer.

"He represents a kind of mind-set, a culture," said Camilla Fox, the executive director of Project Coyote, a wildlife advocacy organization that is calling for government support and training in nonlethal methods and techniques for controlling natural predators, and for widespread adoption of programs like one that has succeeded in Marin County for 15 years.

Brennan and his fellow trappers are the target of a nationwide campaign by Project Coyote and other wildlife conservation organizations to stop what they characterize as indiscriminate killing of wildlife by a rogue agency that still lives by the outdated slogan "the only good predator is a dead predator."

Conservation groups sueThe latest sortie occurred in February when five conservation groups sued the Department of Agriculture for the "wanton killing" of wildlife in Idaho. They want the agency to promote nonlethal methods of control, including guardian dogs, fencing, hazing techniques, night corrals and lambing sheds.

Idaho is notorious for using aerial gunning, neck snares, foothold traps and poison to kill coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, foxes, badgers and other species, according to the suit. The dirty work is mostly done by trappers who have contracts with the department's Wildlife Services branch. Wildlife advocates say this kind of blood lust isn't isolated to the Rocky Mountains. It is happening all over the western United States, including many parts of California.

Project Coyote and four other groups filed a lawsuit last year, challenging a proposed new contract between Mendocino County and Wildlife Services because of what Fox claims is a kill-first, ask-questions-later approach energetically employed by Brennan. Under pressure, the county agreed in a recent settlement to consider nonlethal methods and look into the environmental impacts of controlling predators before renewing its contract, which expires June 30. Still, there appears to be little support in the county for dropping the federal service.

Guard Dog s with sheep

Reached by phone, Brennan said he is "not allowed to talk to the press."

Travis Kocurek, spokesman for the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which oversees the wildlife management program, defended Brennan's use of lethal force in a prepared statement. He said the agency researches nonlethal predator-control methods, and that trappers like Brennan know about and use the techniques when appropriate. Besides, he said, trappers may not kill mountain lions, bears, beavers, deer, elk, turkeys, bobcats, feral swine or gray squirrels unless the affected landowner first obtains a depredation permit from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

"As a federal leader in resolving human-wildlife conflict, Wildlife Services uses a responsible and science-based approach to address damage and problems caused by wildlife," Kocurek wrote in an e-mail. "In cases where nonlethal methods are impractical or have been unsuccessfully implemented in California, we may pursue lethal removal."

Paul Trouette, a Mendocino County Fish and Game commissioner, said guardian dogs, fencing and other nonlethal methods don't work well in Mendocino County because of the steep, rugged terrain. Many predators climb fences, he said, and coyotes and cougars have been known to run sheep and other prey into them for easy kills."I'm always going to go for nonlethal, but sometimes it isn't an option," said Trouette, who is also president of the Mendocino County Blacktail Deer Association, a nonprofit that protects Columbian black-tailed deer herds in California. Besides, he said, "it's like $1,000 to buy a Great Pyrenees, and then there are vet bills. They do a very good job, but if you only have one or two of these dogs, the coyotes will use younger pack members to distract the guard dogs while the others go after the sheep."

Shoot, shovel and shut upThe issue has exacerbated tensions between ranchers and conservationists. Livestock owners in the far northern part of the state have threatened to employ the "three S's" — shoot, shovel and shut up — when confronted with efforts to protect wolves, coyotes and other "vermin," according to state wildlife officials, ranchers and conservation groups. There are as many as 700,000 coyotes in the state, estimates the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Mountain lions are similarly abundant, and both predators kill a lot of livestock, which are commodities that contribute to the state and local economy, according to the California Cattlemen's Association.

Federal trappers kill as many as 80,000 animals in California a year, including close to 5,000 coyotes, according to Wildlife Services charts. Last year, agency employees killed 2.7 million animals nationwide, including wolves, coyotes, bears, mountain lions, beavers, foxes and other animals deemed pests, the federal statistics show."That's 7,400 animals every day nationally," Fox said, noting that nontarget animals, including eagles, are also caught in traps.

There is plenty of support in Mendocino County for Brennan, the federal trapper, though not always among his own neighbors.

Phil Gravier and Lawrence Tells, who live near property Brennan oversees, sought restraining orders and wrote letters or filed complaints with the sheriff's department, Department of Fish and Wildlife and other agencies after Brennan allegedly killed their pet dogs.

Killing dogsAnother neighbor, David O'Leary, also said Brennan has a penchant for killing dogs."Mr. Brennan may be an effective county trapper, but he is also quite well known for being inordinately fond of and proficient at shooting dogs," O'Leary wrote in a legal brief after Brennan sued him over roaming cows.Brennan calls his spread, which is 20 miles north of Laytonville, "Dead Dog Ranch," according to Wildlife Services documents obtained by Project Coyote. Brennan admitted during a 2009 hearing in Mendocino County Superior Court on Gravier's request for a restraining order that he killed "close to 400" dogs over the previous 10 years.

Despite the complaints from neighbors and wildlife advocates, Brennan has never been charged with a crime or been found guilty of wrongdoing. Brennan and his defenders argue that the dogs were almost all stray pit bulls or other purportedly vicious breeds roaming in packs and attacking livestock. Far from being pets, he claims, most of them were guard dogs that had been abandoned by drug dealers and marijuana growers in the county.

"Chris is well respected in his field among clientele and the ranching community," said Trouette, the county fish and game commissioner. "He is an expert in trapping, tracking and in problems with nuisance pests. He is excellent at giving technical assistance to landowners and responds quickly to calls."

But Fox said it isn't Brennan's skills — or even his apparent relish at doing the dirty work — that are at issue as much as the fact that he is typical of many federal trappers who rarely, if ever, consider nonlethal means."I wish I could say that he was the only one," said Fox, who cited the cases of a federal wildlife specialist in Montana, who posted photographs of his dogs mauling a trapped coyote, and an Arizona trapper, who snared his neighbor's dog in a steel trap, forcing it to try to chew its own leg off. "These guys out there whacking wildlife are not getting any training in nonlethal methods and techniques. This culture of cruelty that pervades the agency is deeply ingrained and resistant to change."

Federal systemThe reason for this is an entrenched system of killing that is supported by cattle and sheep ranchers, hunters and farmers — the primary beneficiaries of the contracts counties sign with the Agriculture Department for the right to use federal trappers, said Bob Crabtree, a wildlife ecologist and research professor at the University of Montana.In 2014, Mendocino County signed a $142,356 contract with Wildlife Services. The money, a portion of which is paid by the federal government, covers salaries, vehicles, equipment and supplies, and the services of a wildlife specialist. The government trappers are deployed by county Agriculture Department officials at the request of citizens.

"The force behind all this is the ag industry" which "fights nonlethal control," said Crabtree, who is on the science advisory board for Project Coyote. "It's a Faustian business model. Taxpayer dollars are being mixed with private dollars, creating a lot of money for this killing machine. It can't be justified economically, ethically or ecologically."The culture exists, according to conservationists, despite the fact that there is a nonlethal model in Marin County that has proved to work. In 2000, the county adopted the Marin Livestock and Wildlife Protection Program, which essentially used the money once paid to federal trappers to help ranchers build fences, night corrals and lambing sheds, and to purchase guardian dogs.The movement was inspired by a furor in 1996 over the proposed use of livestock protection collars — containing poison — on sheep in western Marin. At that time, coyotes were killing hundreds of lambs and ewes every year. The poison killed the coyotes when they attacked.

Switch to guard dogsThe county got serious about the issue in 1998 when California banned the use of steel-jawed traps and poisonous collars. Most sheep ranchers in Marin — some two dozen of them— purchased guardian dogs, which naturally bond with sheep and goats, and aggressively protect them. Ranchers credit the dogs with reducing predation at a time when the coyote population has been growing.

"If I didn't have the guard dogs I probably wouldn't be in business," said Francis Cornett, who has 17 dogs protecting 2,300 sheep in the Tomales area of Marin.

Cornett gets $3,000 a year from the county for dog food and fencing. He believes lethal control is sometimes necessary — he lost 35 sheep this past year to coyotes — but only after other deterrents are employed. "There are guys who don't have dogs," he said, "and they lose much more."

The program also helped pay for fences, electrification, noisemakers, lights and motion sensors— all at one-third the cost of predator control under the Wildlife Services program, according to county agricultural officials.

'Indiscriminately' killingProponents of the system weren't given much hope during a May 5 public hearing in Mendocino County, where the general consensus among those who testified seemed to be that coyotes and mountain lions would, if not controlled with weaponry, stalk schoolyards and pick off children during lunch hour.

"What they think is, 'these people are trying to tell us that we can never kill a coyote.' Nobody is saying that," said Keli Hendricks, the predator-friendly ranching coordinator for Project Coyote. "What we are saying is that to spend taxpayer dollars on a government trapper to go out and indiscriminately kill wildlife is inefficient, ineffective and counterproductive."

For the sake of wildlife, Crabtree said, it is imperative that Mendocino County officials look at the evidence."Here is a chance to do what was done in Marin County," Crabtree said. "It can happen if they just give it a chance. But instead of doing that they say what works in Marin won't work in Mendocino. That's not right. It would work just fine."

WASHINGTON – Michigan's U.S. senators today urged the National Park Service to shorten its timetable for addressing a sharp decline in the wolf population at Isle Royale and to consider importing more of the species onto the remote Lake Superior island to bolster its numbers.

The letter to National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis comes after reports, including that in the Free Press, that only three wolves remain on Isle Royale, down from nine last year, according to the winter survey conducted by scientists at Michigan Technological University in Houghton.

As the Free Press reported last month, with the population dropping so sharply, Michigan Tech scientists said they would not be surprised if no wolves remain on the 206-square-mile island, which is also a national park, by next winter.

"An extinction of wolves at Isle Royale could lead to significant, harmful changes to the ecosystem in this remote park," the senators said in the letter to Jarvis. "The three remaining wolves may struggle to reproduce, and if they do produce offspring, the tiny genetic pool will lead to inbreeding and further complications."

An NPS spokesman said Jarvis "will respond, directly and in a timely fashion, to the senators" but offered no other comment on the letter, which was circulated by U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich.

U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, also D-Mich., as well as Sens. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., signed the letter to Jarvis.

The senators want the National Park Service to shorten what is believed to be a 2- to 3-year process for deciding what to do about the declining wolf population to a year or less and reconsider what Peters and the other said is a decision not to bring new wolves to Isle Royale in the near term.

"Bringing new wolves to Isle Royale ... should be preserved as an option," the letter said. "Replenishing the current Isle Royale wolf pack should be strongly considered, especially as an emergency measure."

"Unless the NPS acts quickly, wolves are almost sure to disappear from Isle Royale," the senators added.

Wolves reached Isle Royale more than 50 years ago, crossing frozen ice on the lake. At its peak, the pack reached 50 wolves and averaged about 25 wolves a year until a population crash in recent years, largely due to inbreeding. As the wolf population has fallen, however, the moose population has taken off, from 500 to 1,200 moose in the last four years.

Such an increase in the moose population is expected to have wide-ranging impacts on vegetation and the ecology of the island unless controlled. That, in turn, could lead to a collapse of the moose population as the available plants are consumed.

The senators asked Jarvis to complete a review no later t

han June 1 of next year and asked for a response to their letter no later than July 1 of this year.

DO YOU NEED 4 OR MORE WOLVES TO DOWN A MOOSE?

"An extinction of wolves at Isle Royale could lead to significant, harmful changes to the ecosystem in this remote park," the senators said in the letter to Jarvis. "The three remaining wolves may struggle to reproduce, and if they do produce offspring, the tiny genetic pool will lead to inbreeding and further complications."

An NPS spokesman said Jarvis "will respond, directly and in a timely fashion, to the senators" but offered no other comment on the letter, which was circulated by U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich.

U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, also D-Mich., as well as Sens. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., signed the letter to Jarvis.

The senators want the National Park Service to shorten what is believed to be a 2- to 3-year process for deciding what to do about the declining wolf population to a year or less and reconsider what Peters and the other said is a decision not to bring new wolves to Isle Royale in the near term.

"Bringing new wolves to Isle Royale ... should be preserved as an option," the letter said. "Replenishing the current Isle Royale wolf pack should be strongly considered, especially as an emergency measure."

"Unless the NPS acts quickly, wolves are almost sure to disappear from Isle Royale," the senators added.

Wolves reached Isle Royale more than 50 years ago, crossing frozen ice on the lake. At its peak, the pack reached 50 wolves and averaged about 25 wolves a year until a population crash in recent years, largely due to inbreeding. As the wolf population has fallen, however, the moose population has taken off, from 500 to 1,200 moose in the last four years.

Such an increase in the moose population is expected to have wide-ranging impacts on vegetation and the ecology of the island unless controlled. That, in turn, could lead to a collapse of the moose population as the available plants are consumed.

The senators asked Jarvis to complete a review no later than June 1 of next year and asked for a response to their letter no later than July 1 of this year.

Taken from the survey aircraft in February 2015, this photograph shows the last three wolves believed to inhabit Isle Royale — two adults and, straggling behind, a deformed and unhealthy-looking pup.

It’s that time of year when we await fresh images of wolves in the vast whiteness of Isle Royale, photographed as part of the annual aerial survey that documents their population health.

Or, this year, their virtual demise.

The three you see above are quite likely the last survivors in a decline that has brought the island’s wolves just about to the vanishing point.

Because the two larger animals have not been identified by scat-sample DNA, it isn’t known whether they are from the same pack or even of the same sex, nor whether they produced the smaller wolf – probably a 9-month-old pup – that trails behind them.

But even from an aircraft, researchers write, the straggler’s deformity and other problems are plain:

Its tail was only about half or two-thirds the length of a normal tail, and the end of the tail was marked with two dark bands. ...

Even as a pup, this wolf appeared smaller than average. In images taken on February 15th, this wolf was also characterized by a thin waist line (the other two wolves appeared to have full bellies).

This wolf also consistently displayed an unusual posture: a slightly arched back and guard hairs on its back that tended to stand upright. This is not a wolf that we would expect to live for too much longer.

Nobody can say with scientific certainty that these three represent the end of the line for the wolves of Isle Royale after decades of inbreeding, deepening genetic depression and, in just the last six years, an 88 percent plunge in numbers from a fairly normal 24.

But neither can anyone map a plausible route back to survival, absent major intervention from a reluctant National Park Service. There is only hope that the survivors can produce new pups and that fresh wolves will cross the ice to freshen the gene pool.

Unfortunately, the ice bridges that used to be more common have formed only three times in the last 17 years.

One of these appeared in the winter of 2014 and carried a lone wolf, an injured female nicknamed Isabelle, away from Isle Royale to her death on the Minnesota shore.

Another occurred this past February and brought two wolves over from the mainland. They stayed for less than a week and almost surely returned to Minnesota without even seeing the native trio.

Meanwhile, the loss of five other wolves besides Isabelle since last winter remains unexplained. Even with protection from hunters and a plentiful supply of moose, whose numbers are exploding in the practical absence of their only predator, Isle Royale is a harsh place for a wolf.

From three options to two

The park service’s options appear to have have dwindled, too, from three general approaches to just two: a full-scale reintroduction program or “letting nature take its course.”

A third alternative preferred by the researchers – “genetic rescue” via insertion of a few new mainland wolves, to mimic natural immigration – is probably no longer feasible, in the view of John Vucetich and Rolf Peterson, the current director and retired former director of Michigan Tech’s fabled, 57-year study of wolf/moose interactions in the isolation of Isle Royale.

While adding fresh DNA is the main goal of such a rescue effort, Vucetich explained to me last year, it’s also important to retain a healthy complement of genetically encoded knowledge built up by wolves that have inhabited the island since the late 1940s. Knowledge, for example, about the dangers of taking down a moose.

Last April the superintendent of Isle Royale National Park, Phyllis Green, announced that the park service had decided not to intervene in the wolves’ fate before completing a planning process expected to take at least three years:

The plight of these nine wolves is a compelling story, but we are charged with a larger stewardship picture that considers all factors, including prey species, habitat, and climate change, which could, in a few generations, alter the food base that supports wildlife as we know it on Isle Royale. ...

The park will develop a management plan addressing the many complex factors that affect persistence of Isle Royale wolves and their role in the island ecosystem, including relationships with moose (their preferred prey), the condition of island vegetation and the effects of ongoing climate change.

However, she left room for emergency reconsideration of that plan:

If the island population of wolves declines to all males or all females and if the moose population grows to over-browse island vegetation, bringing wolves to the island remains an option.

To Vucetich and Peterson, overbrowsing is already inevitable.

Their winter survey estimates the island’s moose population, too; having experienced virtually no wolf predation for four years now, it stands at around 1,250 and continues to balloon by something north of 20 percent per year. That’s the highest rate in the survey’s 57-year history and means the moose will likely double by the end of the decade.

No reconsideration, yet

But for now, Green and the park service are still sticking with the wait-and-see program that Peterson, in uncharacteristically hot phrasing, derided to Nature as “dithering – we have science coming out our ears and it wasn’t enough to carry the day against an entrenched bureaucracy with a culture of non-intervention.”

In more than one interview with me over the years, Green has made clear that intervening on behalf of the wolves would be a major boundary crossing and precedent-setter for the park service.

With the sole exception of a wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone – to reverse eradication by hunters and ranchers – no effort of the scope proposed for Isle Royale has yet been undertaken in a national park, nor given more than preliminary consideration.

And according to a report from the Forum News Service, Green thinks there’s still reason to believe the island’s three wolves may include a breeding pair, and that new wolves may still come over from the mainland.

She is said to have explained “that science is just one of several factors that will influence her decision about whether to intervene, along with NPS policies, relevant laws and the needs and the desires of park visitors.

“Some people love hearing a wolf how in the wilderness; others say ‘if you put the wolf out there, I'm not as thrilled about hearing it.’ "

I have to say, that last bit disappoints me, because if ever there was a resource-management issue on which the tourists don’t deserve a vote, this is it.

The wilderness case

Equally off base, I think, are the efforts by some wilderness advocates to simplify this problem into a purportedly philosophical choice between human intervention on the one hand and “letting nature take its course” on the other.

We need to remember that while wolves have been present on Isle Royale for only 65 years or so, the moose are relative newcomers too, having gotten there sometime around the turn of the last century by unknown means, which could have involved human help.

Also, that even as the first wolves were arriving on their own, others were being brought over – from the Detroit Zoo, of all places – by people concerned about out-of-control moose populations and their devastation of the island’s balsam fir forests.

There is an argument to be made, one I understand and respect, that deliberately introducing new wolves to Isle Royale may well run counter to the Wilderness Act, whose provisions now apply to most of this national park.

Some who make this case also draw a distinction – which I confess I have more trouble grasping – between restoring wolves to Yellowstone as a remedy for human overreaching, and restoring them to Isle Royale, where the entire history of wolves carries human fingerprints.

Infection with canine parvovirus from park visitors who brought their damned dogs ashore is just one example. The dwindling frequency of ice bridges in an era of warming climate is another.

And let’s remember, too, that no less an advocate of the Wilderness Act than Aldo Leopold – a Yale-trained forester and pioneering ecologist – was arguing for importing wolves to Isle Royale as a check on the moose and savior of the fir forest even as the first arrivals, some of them in cages, made the whole matter moot.

* * *

Shortly after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, I spent one of the finest afternoons of my life at a spotting scope in the park’s Lamar Valley, watching adult wolves teach their pups how to dismantle an elk.

I’ve yet to see or hear a wolf in several visits to Isle Royale, but that’s OK; I keep going back anyway and I don’t need a vote on management questions.

I do have a vote on our household’s vacation venues, however, and the idea of hiking an Isle Royale increasingly overrun by huge moose – much more threatening to the inattentive human than a wolf – and denuded of a fir forest that only recently began recovering to natural levels, well, that might have some influence.

There’s a certain appealing simplicity, not to mention economy, in “letting nature take its course” as the wolves fade away. Maybe there’s even a certain relief in disentangling from an ecosystem that we’ve been messing with for longer than we sometimes care to remember.

But if what we’re really after is a return to genuine natural balance on Isle Royale, a belated shift to hands-off management is really no solution at all – though it’s awfully pretty to think so.

Increased cougar hunting worse, not better for livestock

But the same traits that helped cougars survive widespread persecution throughout the 20th century, and that routinely keep them out of sight and out of conflict with humans and livestock, have also limited the ability of researchers to study them.

As a result, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife concluded back in 2002 that it had far too little information about cougar populations to determine how to best manage them as development continues to push farther into the higher altitude habitats where some of the best mountain lion habitat remains.

Thirteen years and $5 million later, more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies now offer clear and compelling evidence that protecting adult cougars is a key to conserving their social structure and maintaining viable populations.

And the studies included this revelation: Contrary to the livestock-industry fueled assertion that the best way to prevent cougar attacks on livestock – which are extremely rare – is to kill a lot of cougars, the research found that limiting cougar hunting actually works to limit attacks on livestock and conflicts with humans.

Hunting disrupts cougars’ sex-age structure, leaving behind younger males who fan out to find their own territory. And younger males are more likely to engage in livestock depredations than animals in stable, older populations.

But now, following pressure from a vocal minority to extend the cougar hunting season, a new proposal by the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission to extend the cougar-hunting season threatens to ignore all the research.

Earlier this year, during its regular three-year review of state hunting seasons, the commission proposed to lengthen the cougar season by a single month. Several months later, however, the commission adopted a substantially different rule that would result in far more dead cougars by increasing the cougar-hunting quota by approximately 50 percent in some areas for the 2015-17 hunting seasons.

This drastic change came with no warning to the public, which was given no prior notice the change was even under consideration, and provided no opportunity to offer comments.

According to the commission, Fish and Wildlife assured the commission that the season changes “would probably not change cougar population size, but would likely result in a population with fewer adults, more subadults, and therefore the loss of territorial behavior of adult males.”

That statement is in direct conflict with the findings of the best available and most recent research, which shows that older adults are less likely to engage in any conflict behavior; therefore, creating a population with more subadults – or younger males – actually increasing territorial conflicts between adult males.

In explaining the sudden change of heart, the commission noted that several members of the public asked for increased quotas for cougar hunting. The charge was led by Washington Residents Against Wolves, a special interest group that focuses on eliminating predators from the landscape so their domestic livestock can graze freely on public lands.

Rather than catering to the wishes of an anti-wolf special interest group, the commissioners should be paying closer attention to the views of the majority of Washington residents, who believe in following the best science and protecting native species like cougars.

The commissioners have a legal and moral duty to manage Washington’s wildlife as a public trust, using science, not politics, to guide their oversight of these remarkable animals.

The 13 years and $5 million in research make the strongest case yet for the fact that killing wildlife for the sake of killing should be a thing of the past.

Andrea Santarsiere is a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s office in Victor, Idaho.

Not long ago, I saw an article assessing why people hunt. This was posted on a hunting website so all the questions were pretty friendly. One of the top reasons given was to hunt for meat, which this site heralded as a sound justification for hunting. This is the age old view of subsistence hunting where hunters are just trying to put food on the table and to deny them of that is somehow denying them food that they could otherwise not be able to have or afford.

Obviously imbedded in this argument for hunting is that the meat a hunter can get will be much cheaper than what he or she could normally get by going to the local grocery store. Let’s look at the economics behind hunting for meat to see if that is indeed true. To do this, I used the per hunter expenditures from the 2011 U.S. Fish and Wildlife National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-associated Recreation

(http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/fhw11-nat.pdf). I used data from several western states, where “subsistence” hunting would seem to have the greatest need. In doing so, it is first necessary to limit the search a little. What I asked was, what do big game (elk and deer) hunters spend, which had to be separated out from just hunting, included bunnies and squirrels and would give the best return on a hunter’s investment. In this case the return is, on average, 40 pounds of deer venison or 150 pounds of elk meat from one animal, the usual hunting limit. I then simply divided the amount hunters spent by these figures to get an estimate of how much per pound they were paying for this meat. Now this assumes that a person actually gets a deer or an elk. As we know however, normally hunter success is below 50% and so obviously those who went hunting for meat and got nothing, spent all their money for…well, nothing. To get an average amount hunters overall spend per pound, I obtained the number of hunters and hunter success data from the various game agencies’ websites. I then estimated how much big game hunters overall spent and divided that by the total poundage of deer or elk the successful hunters got.

What did I find? First how much did successful hunters pay per pound. In Montana, big game hunters spent an average of $2,592 to go hunting. If they killed a deer, that deer cost them $64.80 a pound. If they killed an elk, it cost $17.28 a pound. Moving to Wyoming, the values are $35.45 for deer and $9.45 for elk. Nevada: $50.32 for deer and $13.42 for elk. Idaho: $33.60 per pound for deer, $8.96 per pound for elk. I think the pattern is quite clear, deer meat costs the hunter in excess of $30.00 a pound while elk, if you get one, is more reasonable for a little over $10.00 a pound.

But how about the hunters that didn’t get an animal? Just as an example, in Montana there were over 122,000 deer hunters, each spending $2,592 or over $317 million to kill a little over 66,000 deer or an average per pound cost of $119.88. For elk it again is a little more reasonable but the overall cost of that pound of elk was $88.80.

So there you have it. At the going rate of around $8.00 per pound of boneless sirloin, the average big game hunter could have bought 5.7 times more meat that a deer provides and 1.5 times more than what he would get from an elk…if he got one! Considering the overall costs, the “economics” of meat hunting becomes even less tenable. Even for elk, hunters overall are spending 10 times more than what they could collectively buy in comparable quantities of beef.

In defense, many would say, well it’s not the economics alone it is the quality of the meat. I have hunted and tasted both elk and venison and, I think the many hunters and their families, who end up giving much of the meat they get away, would agree, the meat is ok but I would not spend $30 a pound or more for it!

So if a person says they are hunting for the meat, to supply food on the table, they need to take a basic economics class!

Why then do they hunt? There are a lot of other reasons, some of them more valid, some maybe not so. In all cases, hunters should be honest to themselves and the rest of us, hunting for food just does not make sense. If your family needs meat that badly, go to the local supermarket, it is a lot cheaper!

Last year two ecologists from Yale University released spiders into cages of grasshoppers. However, the spiders didn't eat even one grasshopper because their mouthparts had been glued shut. Still, the grasshoppers were terrified, and it was noted that their metabolism increased by at least 40 percent. This led to a significant change in their diet, as they ate more carb-heavy goldenrod plants and decreased their protein intake from grasses.

This change in animal behavior signals what might be called a paradigm shift in ecological thinking. Just the mere fear of predation can lead to remarkable changes in an animal's behavior. And this in turn has a big impact on the landscape. And of course, since ecosystems involve long routes of energy flow, the impact on the landscape then further impacts the lives of other animals.

John Laundre, an ecologist at the State University of New York at Oswego, noticed the impact of fear on animals' behavior after the re-introduction of grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park while he was studying elk. And he has found that the greatest impact predators can have over their prey is not by killing but rather by instilling fear in them. He coined the term for this: landscape of fear.

SmartPlanet spoke with Laundre about his observations in Yellowstone and how the idea of a landscape of fear can be used today to change and rebuild entire ecosystems.

SmartPlanet: In 1995 you observed an amazing change in elk behavior two years after the re-introduction of grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

John Laundre: That first year we looked at areas where both the elk and wolves [roamed] and areas of the park the wolves hadn’t gotten to yet, because they [had been] released in the northern part of the park.

So you had the advantage of observing areas where wolves were and comparing to areas where they hadn't populated yet.By the second year we could easily see that in areas where the wolves were released the elk were a lot more fearful. In areas where the wolves still hadn’t gotten to, [it] was like scene out of the Disneyland. The elk were bounding around and not paying too much attention at all.

What did fear look like?

Well it’s a kind of apprehension. They spend more time lifting their head and looking around. And their calves were right by their sides. You could tell they were afraid of being attacked.You coined the ecological term, “landscape of fear.” What does that mean?

Predators have what we call “level of lethality,” which is the fact that the level of ability to catch varies with habitat. No predator is an expert in all habitats.

Wolves are more lethal in open areas because they run them down. Cougars on the other hand sneak up on their prey and so they’re more lethal on forest edges.

So the landscape contains levels of varying risk for prey. So the level of fear within the prey changes across the landscape as the vegetation changes. And this also changes what we call the lethality of the predator.

Presumably the landscape of fear is not innate but something learned. So if the wolves had not roamed Yellowstone for 70 years, how could the elk know to be afraid of them?

Right. Well there are anecdotal stories about when the wolves were first released they ran among the elk and the elk viewed them just as big coyotes, nothing to be afraid of, until they killed couple of them. When you see you neighbor being killed you start to get the idea that this is something you need to be afraid of.

But the surprising conclusion that came out of Yellowstone is that fear itself is what changed the behavior of elk not the number of killings by wolves.

Yes. Of course predators do kill their prey. But they’re not very efficient at killing. The average estimate of efficiency is about 20 percent. That means that 80 percent of the time, the animals are surviving a near death experience.

That is where the learning comes in. They learn that they come closer to being killed if they’re caught out in the open than if they’re caught in the woods. If you escape death you learn where you escaped and you learn how you escaped.

In fact many [ecologists] feel that predators manage the fear of their prey. Like a good hunter they may not overhunt an area. For instance, if hunters go out and hunt an area, soon the animal will become difficult to find. So hunters might let the area rest.

The longer something doesn’t happen the lower our guard goes. [And this same phenomena occurs within the predator-prey relationship.]

How has the landscape of fear impacted the entire ecosystem?

Well, we know what the impact is when there is no landscape of fear. The large ruminants decimate their habitat. In the Eastern US, for instance, we’re suffering the consequences of not having large predators. The deer are eating up the forest.

What we are seeing in Yellowstone now is the process of rejuvenation of habitat because elk are afraid to basically move around the habitat freely grazing. For instance Willows and Aspens have recovered tremendously in the park.

I understand there are studies that proved that just evidence of the existence of a predator can instill fear and alter species' diets.

Yes. And there is a study coming out soon where researchers presented scents, scats and vocalizations of a predator but never presented the actual predator. And they saw how these things change the behavior of the prey animals. So there are a lot of neat designs that can be done. Some that demonstrate that behavior change can come not from just killing but just the presence of predator.This of course reminds us of the classic presence of scarecrows in a corn field.

Right, but there has to be a certain degree of lethality. The scarecrow eventually doesn’t work because he is not lethal. This is why the plastic owls don’t work after a while. They work initially because the crows see them and stay away until they catch on that the owl has been sitting there a long time.

How can this landscape of fear help us manage entire ecosystems?

One of the things I’m looking into right now is the impact of the landscape of fear. We talk about scaring the prey. But predators will also kill, and the killing depends upon how much safe or risky habitat exists in the landscape.

One can envision an area that’s 70 percent safe and 30 percent risky. The prey can avoid the dangerous areas and so in that particular habitat I would predict the prey population will be pretty plentiful but the predator population will be lower.

Now let’s switch it, and say it’s 70 percent risk and 30 percent safe. Now what we have is an area where the predator is fairly lethal, and we'll have a lower level of prey. What I argue is we can mange this predator-prey relationship by managing the landscape.

Can you give us an example?

Yes, take bighorn sheep. Forest fires keep a lot of areas open and bighorn sheep need open areas. When we suppress the fire [which we want to do] the trees and the shrub grow back. That provides ideal hunting habitat for cougars. Then many say we have to control the cougar. But we don’t need to control the cougar. We need to control the habitat.

We need to look at the land [or habitat] and understand what balance of risky versus safe habitat will provide us a balance of predator and prey.

So landscape becomes a very, very strong management tool. Once we understand what the landscape of fear is for a particular species then we can go in an manage the habitat depending on what our conservation goals are.

Another example is the cottontail rabbit population. It’s declining mainly because the shrub cover is declining, and that is happening mainly because of over-browsing by deer. So its “safe habitat” is declining and it is more vulnerable to predation by foxes and coyotes.

The answer is not to control the foxes and coyotes but to somehow instill fear into the deer to allow the appropriate safe habitat for cottontails to come back.

Two Massachusetts Eastern Coyotes at their den site

Eastern Wolf in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada

Aldo Leopold--3 quotes from his SAN COUNTY ALMANAC

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Aldo Leopold

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Aldo Leopold

''To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."

Wildlife Rendezvous

Like so many conscientious hunters and anglers come to realize, good habitat with our full suite of predators and prey make for healthy and productive living............Teddy Roosevelt depicted at a "WILDLIFE RENDEZVOUS"

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